When a very faithful adaptation gets an award for originality…

Recently my first Edgar Allan Poe musical short film adaptation “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” received an award for Best Original Screenplay from the East Village New York Film Festival.

Which was unusual. Not just because it was awarded by a film festival even though this film concluded its official festival run several years ago (East Village New York New York Film Festival invited me to submit for free, and since they had only just played and awarded my second Poe adaptation “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre“, I submitted Tell-Tale).

An award in general was not unusual either. Tell-Tale has received over 60 awards, if I may so immodestly point out. No, what is unusual is the award category: original screenplay. After all “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” is an adaptation of the famous Edgar Allan Poe short story. Many awards bodies give out screenplay awards for “original screenplay” and “adapted screenplay”, and in that case “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” clearly would fall into the “adapted” category.

But East Village New York New York Film Festival gave out just one screenplay award (plus three honorable mentions) and I am very pleased to have received it … except for the awkward addition of the “original” adjective.

You see, I pride myself on how not original the screenplay to “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” is. By which I mean I pride myself on how almost every word of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story is faithfully carried over into my musical adaptation.

Wait, almost? What do I mean by almost?

Okay, one sentence has been modified. “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth” got changed to “I heard all things in heaven. I heard all things on earth” because doing so helped me develop an important musical theme.

Another sentence, “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded — with what caution — with what foresight” gets repeated multiple times, and for the sake of variety gets its key words like “wisely” and “foresight” replaced with synonyms like “deftly” and “prudence” with each repeat.

Some other key sentences like “True, nervous, very very dreadfully nervous” also get repeated in my adaptation, returning in later sections of the libretto like an interrupting nervous tic.

And every now and then a “can not” becomes a “can’t” for easier rhythmic rendering of fast passages.

But that’s it. The vast majority of Poe’s text is rendered just as he wrote it, and I am proud of that.

It makes the many times I have been awarded for my music even sweeter to me, since it is perhaps even more notable to successfully musically render text not originally intended as musical libretto or song lyrics – if I may so immodestly pat myself on the shoulder again.

But you may now see why I feel rather conflicted for being awarded for screenplay originality since I take such pride in how closely and faithfully I managed to appropriated Poe’s text as Poe wrote it.

The same internal handwringing bedeviled me when I originally performed “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” as a one man stage show at the New York Fringe Festival … and won the award for outstanding music and lyrics.

The music was all do to me, and I felt honored to be awarded for it.

But the lyrics? Except for those few synonyms and that paraphrase, well, the lyrics are all Edgar Allan Poe’s really. I made some additional creative choices, perhaps, when deciding what parts were to be sung and what parts were to be spoken, but even that is more a choice of music composition, not lyric writing.

In a way, being awarded for lyrics of which 99% I most certainly didn’t write myself is even more difficult for me to accept than a screenplay award. After all the screenplay is not just about the words, it is also the document that spells out exactly how the story will be transcribed into the medium of film – camera angles, set design, visual effects decisions – all that and more was delineated in the screenplay. The script visualized the film in advance.

But it was still an adaptation of Poe, not an original screenplay…

Oh well, I probably should just get over myself, say thank you for the award, and let it be.

Thank you.